Black Mesa is a first-person shooter video game, developed and published by Crowbar Collective. It is a third-party remake of Half-Life in the Source game engine. Originally published as a free mod in September 2012, the game was given approval by Valve (the developers of Half-Life) for a commercial release. The commercial version was first published as an early access title in May 2015 and had its full release in March 2020 for Microsoft Windows and Linux, with future plans for a macOS version.
Black Mesa was developed in response to Half-Life: Source (2005), Valve's port of Half-Life to the Source engine, which lacked new features or improvements. The project was formed by the merging of two separate teams that wanted to improve on the Source remake, eventually becoming Crowbar Collective. While they had originally targeted a release by 2009, the team realized they had rushed to this point, and reevaluated their efforts to improve the quality of the remake.
Since then, attention to details, adapting the game to an improved version of the Source engine, and completely reworking the oft-derided final chapters of Half-Life known as Xen had lengthened the development efforts into the remake. Due to its long development time, the modification became notable for its delays on the status of its completion. Among major changes in the remake include reskinned collection of textures, models, and NPCs; a longer runtime; improved level and puzzle design along with challenging enemy artificial intelligence, and additional dialogue and story elements.
Black Mesa received highly positive reviews from critics upon its initial release. Praise was directed towards the gameplay and attention to detail, comparing it to that of an official Valve release, as well as for the improvements they had made on the Xen chapters.
Gameplay
Black Mesa is a first-person shooter that requires the player to perform combat tasks and solve various puzzles to advance through the game. From a design standpoint, the core gameplay remains largely unchanged from the original base Half-Life game; the player can carry a number of weapons that they find through the course of the game, though they must also locate and monitor ammunition for most weapons. The player's character is protected by a hazard suit that monitors the player's health and can be charged as a shield, absorbing a limited amount of damage. Health and battery packs can be found scattered through the game, as well as stations that can recharge either health or suit charge.
However, unlike Half-Life: Source, which merely featured the original game's assets and geometry ported to the Source engine, Black Mesa has been purpose-built from the ground up to take full advantage of the newest versions of Source, not just for its graphical capabilities, but for its myriad updates to the game's physics engine, puzzle complexity, and platforming capability. The artificial intelligence of the enemy characters has also been improved over Half-Life to provide more of a challenge, with some of the combat spaces redefined to provide more options to the player. In addition, several narrative and design changes have been made to account for the numerous story threads presented via Retcon in Half-Life 2. While most of the general design and progress through the game levels remains the same as Half-Life, the largest change in Black Mesa is the reworking of the game's final chapter, Xen, which was generally considered the weakest part of the original game.
Black Mesa also includes support for the individual and team deathmatch multiplayer modes from Half-Life on similarly-updated maps.
Plot
The plot of Black Mesa is almost identical to Half-Life's storyline. Like in the original game, the player controls Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist working at the Black Mesa Research Facility. He is tasked to place a sample of anomalous material into an Anti-Mass Spectrometer for analysis, using the Mark IV Hazardous Environment Suit to do so safely. However, the sample causes a "resonance cascade", devastating the facility and creating an interdimensional rift to an alien dimension called Xen, bringing its alien creatures to Earth. Freeman survives the incident, finds other survivors, and is tasked to make his way to the surface to call for help. Upon reaching the surface, however, he finds that the facility is being cleansed of any living thing - human or alien - by the military. Freeman learns from the surviving scientists the only way to stop the alien invasion is to cross over to Xen and destroy the entity keeping the rift open.
Screenshots from the game Black Mesa
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